Benefits of Conferences
I love meeting new people at conferences, especially when people are first time conference attendees. One of my favorite questions to ask is “What did you have to do to get approval to attend?” The question reveals a lot about their employer and the person’s direct manager.
In many organizations, conference attendance is seen as a transactional affair with only specific line items in the transaction providing any sort of intrinsic value. These organizations saddle their employees with requirements that must be met in order to attend the conference. They have note taking requirements, presentations to give when they return and required talks to attend when at the conference. These are just a few of the requirements I’ve heard in my attendance days. It can be easy to dress these requirements up as “due diligence” but in most cases I’ve come across, this level of rigor only seems to apply to conferences. What is more likely happening is that these organizations don’t see the concrete value they expect to see from attending conferences and therefore discount them. But conferences deliver an impact that can be clearly felt, despite their concrete value being difficult to calculate and put on a ledger.
The Hallway Track
Anyone who has attended a conference will tell you that the hallway track is often the most valuable part of the conference. The hallway track is the part of the conference that is unscheduled and unscripted. As people make their way from one talk to another, they inevitably bump into each other and start a conversation that slowly balloons into something larger. Sometimes the conversation is so interesting that you forgo your next talk in favor of this impromptu conversation in-between sessions.
The magic about these conversations is that they tend to take on a life of their own, bending and weaving with the desires of the participants. Something that starts as a follow up questions on distributed locking techniques can quickly evolve into questions that are deeper and more specific to your particular problem. And despite everyone’s desire to be special, conferences make you realize that most of us are solving similar sets of problems. Even if you don’t get a definitive solution out of these talks, I assure you that you’ll get a briefing on how not to solve the problem.
The hallway track has been difficult to replicate virtually. Since the onset of the pandemic, many groups have tried and found very inventive ways to imitate it, but there’s nothing quite like the real thing. Equally difficult is putting a dollar value on the track. There’s no time slot you can point at to show your boss why you want to attend. It’s something organic that evolves, but more importantly, that you have some semblance of control over. Yes your mileage may vary but that’s really the case for everything.
Introduction to new thoughts and ideas
Albert Einstein is often attributed with the quote;
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
This axiom can exist within engineering groups. They get trapped into their standard way of thinking and can’t see how a different approach might work. “That would never work here” is a common retort to new ideas. But continued and expanded expansion to new ideas and their successful implementations makes people question the way they do things. Again, never be surprised by just how many people have the same problems you have. Unless you’re Facebook, Apple, Netflix or Google, many companies have the same types of problems. It’s hard to accept that you’re not a special, magical snowflake but attending a conference can force that acceptance pretty quickly.
Sometimes these new ideas and approaches to your problem are not packaged in a flashy title that draws your attention. In my experience some of the best tid bits of information come from talks that I would have never attended or watched on my own. But when I’m at a conference, there’s always a block of time that doesn’t have a talk that speaks directly to my problems. When attending a conference in person I’m more compelled to attend a random talk in that situation. It’s incredible how often that random talk pays dividends. Would I have spent 45 minutes on that talk if I just came across it on YouTube? Probably not. But broadening the scope of what I hear and attend helps with problems that are not top of mind. Better yet, you realize that some of your underlying problems are related to activities, actions or systems that you hadn’t previously considered. Exposure to people, their problems, ideas and solutions helps to expand your thinking about your own problems.
Getting your company name out in the community
You might work for a small or medium size company that just isn’t on the mind’s of technical professionals. Attending conferences (and even better, speaking at them) helps to get your company name into the tech community. With remote work opportunities continuing to grow, the number of potential prospects sky rockets with conference attendance.
In addition to socializing the company name, you’re also socializing the company’s values by the fact that you have employees in attendance! You’d be surprised how valuable that can be to potential job seekers. I’m always surprised when I’m at a DevOps Days conference and I meet someone working at a bank or a hospital, industries that I associate with old-world thinking and mentalities. But talking to those attendees and hearing that their teams are experimenting with DevOps practices, using modern technologies and work management techniques helps to change my biased view of them.
Energizing your employees
The post-conference buzz is real. Once you’ve gotten all of this new information, you’re eager to see how it can be applied to your day-to-day work. Many people come back to the office with a basket of ideas, some of them completely crazy, but many of them completely practical and achievable. As a team you’ll have to figure out which are which. With the support of management that buzz can be channelled into making real change and providing employees with immense job satisfaction as they do it.
Job satisfaction = Retention
No amount of healthy snacks, ping-pong tables and free soda can replace the joy engineers get when they can effect change.
Virtual attendance
A quick note about virtual attendance. During the pandemic conference organizers tried very hard, with varying degrees of success, to replicate the in-person conference feel virtually. But regardless of how well conference organizers do this, remote conferences can be difficult.
For starters, networking virtually can be hard. It requires a level of intentionality either on the conference organizers or as you as an attendee. Chat rooms during a conference talk are a common way of trying to generate those networking opportunities, but they can distract you from the speaker. Hanging out in chatrooms after the talk can sometimes be effective, but again just not quite the same as in person.
Another thing to consider with virtual attendance is how you attend it. Many people attend conferences virtually, but remain logged into all of their usual modes of communication for work, which effectively means, you’re working. Without a clear separation from your work duties, virtual attendance can give way to the usual pressures of the “office”.
These are just a couple of reasons why I favor in-person conferences to virtual conferences. Are virtual conferences better than nothing? Absolutely. But I caution you to not evaluate the value of conferences based solely on virtual conferences.
Wrap-up
Conferences can be a great resource for your employees to engage in the communities that they’re a part of. Networking is crucial to building relationships and knowledge and that is an activity that can be much easier to do in person.
Conferences help expose people to new ideas and new ways to solve problems other than the standard approach the company may take. When you attend conferences you quickly learn that your problems are not as unique as you thought. You’ll without a doubt run into people that have the same problems as you. You’ll probably even meet people who have tried the same solutions and can save you from a wasted journey.
Conferences also help to energize employees. You come back from a conference and you’re excited to experiment with a lot of the techniques and technologies you learned about.
If your company won’t send you to a conference, here’s a few quick tips that might help.
- Some conferences have free tickets, especially for underrepresented groups. If you’re curious about a conference but can’t attend, definitely look into this option. I’ve seen some conferences even cover hotel and air fare.
- Speaking at conferences is another way to get into the event for free. Many conferences have a public Call for Proposals (CFP) process that you can submit to. Don’t think you need some crazy, mind bending thing to give a talk about. Your personal experience, personal communication style and touch can’t be replicated and is something unique to offer. Try it out!
- Try to show the value of the conference to your management. Highlight why you want to attend the conference and some of the soft benefits beyond what watching the YouTube videos after the conference can provide. You can use some of the points highlighted in this article.
- Pay for the conference yourself. Be sure to talk to your manager and let them know that you’re willing to pay for the conference yourself if they can support you with time off and or some help with the travel expense. This technique is depends heavily on your personal situation and the size of the conference.
- Find a new job. (Seriously) I’m not suggesting you quit right now over it, but you might want to consider adding a question about conference attendance to your list of interview questions.
